scholarly journals City Care: Historical and Contemporary Lessons from Environmental Justice Coalition-Building

2021 ◽  
Vol 3 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Elizabeth Grennan Browning
Keyword(s):  
Climate Change ◽  
Civil Rights ◽  
Environmental Justice ◽  
Environmental History ◽  
Environmental Movement ◽  
Urban Environments ◽  
Early Years ◽  
Coalition Building ◽  
Racial Equity ◽  
Civil Rights Organizations

This article examines the historical roots of the challenges facing contemporary climate justice advocacy campaigns, and draws lessons from this history regarding how to more comprehensively address racial equity in resilience planning and environmentalist advocacy. As the modern US environmental movement gained momentum in the 1970s, fault lines developed between environmentalists and civil rights advocates. A key source of tension was debates over whether urban environments were deserving of the same kinds of environmental protections as more traditional and pristine forms of “nature.” African Americans’ prioritization of economic equity alongside legal equality also led to a critical dialogue about economic growth and the economic externalities of regulating industry and safeguarding the environment. This article draws on environmental justice and environmental history scholarship as integrated lenses for analyzing racialized debates during the early years of the modern American environmental movement. I trace how public deliberations played out regarding the first Earth Day in 1970, and the City Care Conference of 1979—the first national conference that brought together major environmental groups such as the Sierra Club and civil rights organizations such as the National Urban League to deliberate the linkages between racial equity and environmentalism. Finally, I connect these historical analyses to recent data from the Indiana University Environmental Resilience Institute’s Hoosier Life Survey in order to better understand contemporary racialized disparities of climate change vulnerability, and relatedly, of climate change opinion.

Environmental and Climate Justice

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Steve Vanderheiden
Keyword(s):  
Climate Change ◽  
Civil Rights ◽  
Environmental Justice ◽  
Environmental Sustainability ◽  
Global Climate ◽  
Climate Change Policy ◽  
Climate Justice ◽  
Poor People ◽  
Mitigation And Adaptation ◽  
Climate Treaty

This chapter surveys the origin and development of environmental justice discourse from its early use as a civil rights strategy to resist the siting of hazardous waste facilities in the neighborhoods of poor people of color to its more contemporary usage as a directive for equity in global cooperation in pursuit of environmental sustainability. From debates among scholars and activists over the demands of justice as applied to problems of global climate change mitigation and adaptation, or climate justice, it examines three principles of justice invoked in a landmark climate treaty and later applied to the design and evaluation of international climate change policy efforts. The chapter concludes by considering potential new directions that environmental justice theorizing might take in the context of other issues in environmental politics.

Environmental Law and Feminism

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Cinnamon P. Carlarne
Keyword(s):  
Climate Change ◽  
Environmental Justice ◽  
Environmental Degradation ◽  
Environmental Law ◽  
Climate Justice ◽  
Coalition Building ◽  
The Law ◽  
Gender Based ◽  
And Gender

This article explores the important but poorly understood relationship between environmental law and legal feminism. The modern legal movements to curb environmental degradation and gender-based discrimination are still young. For environmentalism, the focus is on constraining unbridled ecosystem destruction. For feminism, the focus is on discovering and unraveling the systems that subordinate women. Little has been done, however, to cultivate or respond to these movements’ linkages. The onset of climate change and the maturing of climate law, however, are bringing renewed attention to this underexplored relationship. The article explores how the evolution of ecofeminism, the environmental justice movement, and the climate justice movement are advancing thinking at the intersection of environmental law and feminism and the law. In particular, it suggests that as both fields increasingly seek to situate ongoing challenges within larger structures of power and inequality, they draw closer together, creating opportunities for intellectual exchange and coalition building.

Environmental Justice

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Gary Bryner
Keyword(s):  
Climate Change ◽  
Civil Rights ◽  
Environmental Justice ◽  
Low Income ◽  
Ethical Issues ◽  
The Public ◽  
Early Twenty ◽  
Creative Solutions ◽  
The Face ◽  
Late Twentieth

Environmental justice brings together two of the most powerful social movements of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, environmentalism and civil rights. Despite the success in reducing pollution and improving environmental quality in many areas, the reduction of race- and income-based disparities in environmental conditions, such as the levels of pollution to which individuals are exposed, has seen limited progress. Minority and low income communities continue to bear the brunt of environmental burdens. The idea of environmental justice also helps clarify the ethical issues underlying climate change and compels action to reduce the threat even in the face of uncertainties and to help poor nations with the costs of adapting to disruptive climate change. A major challenge in environmental justice is deciding how to define the problem. Five options for framing the issue of environmental justice capture most of the approaches taken by advocates and scholars. These are the civil rights framework; theories of distributive justice, fairness, and rights; the public participation framework, social justice framework, and ecological sustainability framework. These frameworks are not mutually exclusive. They overlap considerably and proponents of one primary framework may rely on elements of others as they frame the issues. Advocates of environmental justice will find that elements of each can contribute to their goal. No one framework is sufficient, but in recognizing where those with other views are coming from, we can develop opportunities for creative solutions that bring together alternative approaches.

ICDP PROJECT DEEPCHALLA: RECONSTRUCTING ~250,000 YEARS OF CLIMATE CHANGE AND ENVIRONMENTAL HISTORY ON THE EAST AFRICAN EQUATOR

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Dirk Verschuren ◽  
◽  
Maarten Van Daele ◽  
Chris Wolff ◽  
Nicholas Waldmann ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Climate Change ◽  
Environmental History ◽  
East African

The Historiography of Environmental History

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
J. R. McNeill
Keyword(s):  
Climate Change ◽  
Environmental History ◽  
Industrial Pollution ◽  
Full Scale ◽  
Environmental Concerns ◽  
The Us ◽  
The World ◽  
History Of ◽  
The 1960S ◽  
The Relationship

This chapter discusses the emergence of environmental history, which developed in the context of the environmental concerns that began in the 1960s with worries about local industrial pollution, but which has since evolved into a full-scale global crisis of climate change. Environmental history is ‘the history of the relationship between human societies and the rest of nature’. It includes three chief areas of inquiry: the study of material environmental history, political and policy-related environmental history, and a form of environmental history which concerns what humans have thought, believed, written, and more rarely, painted, sculpted, sung, or danced that deals with the relationship between society and nature. Since 1980, environmental history has come to flourish in many corners of the world, and scholars everywhere have found models, approaches, and perspectives rather different from those developed for the US context.

scholarly journals On storiation and what is washed ashore: The Anthropocene as big kahuna

2021 ◽  
pp. 204382062110174
Author(s):  
Elena Burgos Martinez
Keyword(s):  
Climate Change ◽  
Environmental History ◽  
Environmental Degradation ◽  
Social Research ◽  
Critical Perspective

This commentary begins by outlining current debates on the notion of the Anthropocene from a critical perspective. Subsequently, it will discuss how Pugh and Chandler (2021) directly address such a problematic and how their work contributes to pluralising contemporary academic debates on the Anthropocene. Their previous academic engagements are no stranger to questions of epistemic discrimination in the broad fields of geography, geopolitics, island studies, and social research, and, more concretely, mainstreamed anthropological thinking. This commentary will therefore focus on their call for storiation and its relevance for contemporary debates seeking more ethical, localised, fluid, and coherent approaches to environmental degradation, environmental history, island identity, geopolitics of climate change, and indigeneity. From all the shapes storiation can take, this commentary focuses on indigenous storiation as embodiment.

scholarly journals Effect of environmental history on the habitat-forming kelp Macrocystis pyrifera responses to ocean acidification and warming: a physiological and molecular approach

2021 ◽  
Vol 11 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Pamela A. Fernández ◽  
Jorge M. Navarro ◽  
Carolina Camus ◽  
Rodrigo Torres ◽  
Alejandro H. Buschmann
Keyword(s):  
Climate Change ◽  
Ocean Acidification ◽  
Environmental History ◽  
Coastal Upwelling ◽  
Macrocystis Pyrifera ◽  
Natural Variability ◽  
Kelp Forests ◽  
Species Response ◽  
Enhanced Expression ◽  
Mesocosm Experiments

AbstractThe capacity of marine organisms to adapt and/or acclimate to climate change might differ among distinct populations, depending on their local environmental history and phenotypic plasticity. Kelp forests create some of the most productive habitats in the world, but globally, many populations have been negatively impacted by multiple anthropogenic stressors. Here, we compare the physiological and molecular responses to ocean acidification (OA) and warming (OW) of two populations of the giant kelp Macrocystis pyrifera from distinct upwelling conditions (weak vs strong). Using laboratory mesocosm experiments, we found that juvenile Macrocystis sporophyte responses to OW and OA did not differ among populations: elevated temperature reduced growth while OA had no effect on growth and photosynthesis. However, we observed higher growth rates and NO3− assimilation, and enhanced expression of metabolic-genes involved in the NO3− and CO2 assimilation in individuals from the strong upwelling site. Our results suggest that despite no inter-population differences in response to OA and OW, intrinsic differences among populations might be related to their natural variability in CO2, NO3− and seawater temperatures driven by coastal upwelling. Further work including additional populations and fluctuating climate change conditions rather than static values are needed to precisely determine how natural variability in environmental conditions might influence a species’ response to climate change.

scholarly journals “We Are Not Copyists”: Socialist Networks and Non-alignment from Below in A. Philip Randolph’s Asian Journey

2019 ◽  
Vol 53 (2) ◽  
pp. 402-428
Author(s):  
Su Lin Lewis
Keyword(s):  
African American ◽  
Cold War ◽  
Civil Rights ◽  
Early Years ◽  
Soviet Bloc ◽  
Labor Movements ◽  
Trade Unionist ◽  
The Cold War ◽  
Cultural Freedom ◽  
Hearts And Minds

Abstract In 1952, A. Philip Randolph, the head of America’s largest black union and a prominent civil rights campaigner, traveled to Japan and Burma funded by the American Committee for Cultural Freedom. In Asia, he encountered socialists and trade unionists struggling to negotiate the fractious divides between communism and capitalism within postwar states. In Burma, in particular, Western powers, the Soviet bloc, and powerful Asian neighbors used propaganda, aid missions, and subsidized travel to offer competing visions of development while accusing each other of new forms of imperialism and foreign interference. In such an environment, a battle for hearts and minds within Asian labor movements constituted the front lines of the early years of the Cold War. Randolph’s journey shows us how Asian socialists and trade unionists responded to powerful foreign interests by articulating an early sense of non-alignment, forged in part through emerging Asian socialist networks, well before this was an official strategy. The Asian actors with whom Randolph interacted in Japan and Burma mirrored his own struggles as a socialist, a trade unionist, and a “railway man” while furthering his campaign for civil rights at home. This article uses Randolph’s journey to examine parallels and divergences between African-American and Asian socialists and trade unionists during the early Cold War, an age characterized by deepening splits in the politics of the Left.

“Women know how to get things done”: narrative of an intersectional movement

2017 ◽  
Vol 12 (1) ◽  
pp. 31-41 ◽  
Author(s):  
Amanda Elizabeth Vickery
Keyword(s):  
Civil Rights ◽  
Social Studies ◽  
African American Women ◽  
Design Methodology ◽  
Content Type ◽  
American Women ◽  
Know How ◽  
Civil Rights Organizations ◽  
The Social ◽  
The World

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to explore how African-American women, both individually and collectively, were subjected to both racism and sexism when participating within civil rights organizations. Design/methodology/approach Because of the intersection of their identities as both African and American women, their experiences participating and organizing within multiple movements were shaped by racism and patriarchy that left them outside of the realm of leadership. Findings A discussion on the importance of teaching social studies through an intersectional lens that personifies individuals and communities traditionally silenced within the social studies curriculum follows. Originality/value The aim is to teach students to adopt a more inclusive and complex view of the world.

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